by Gary Brozek
In the meantime, I had a lot more slogging to do. The going was not getting any easier, and along with my injuries, there was something wrong with my stomach. I couldn’t eat a thing. I was nauseous and a persistent, painful diarrhea was plaguing me. Tom was struggling as much as I was because of his injuries. Marc, being the youngest of us, and the least hurt as far as we could tell, was making better time. Our line was being strung out, and for much of the march into the second day, I couldn’t see Marc at all. I knew he was in front of Tom and me, but I didn’t know just how far. As night fell on that second day, I had no idea how long it had been since we’d seen him.
We marched until well after dark, stopped alongside a stream, and sat down on a rocky embankment on stones the size of a baby’s head. They laid a sheet of black plastic on the rocks, and that’s where we slept. In spite of the rocks poking my spine, I passed out pretty fast, but I woke up a while later when the rain came pouring down on top of us. I’d done enough camping in my life to know that rain is a usual part of being outdoors, but it still piled insult on top of insult on top of injury. We moved under one of the guerrillas’ tarps to get out of the rain. All night long the sound the rain on the tarp and on the rocks was punctuated by the sound of my guts spilling out of me as I vomited and shat every couple of hours. I couldn’t eat, water would run right through me or right back out of me, and I knew on top of my ribs being broken and everything else, I was getting dehydrated.
In the middle of the night I turned to Tom, saying, “I’m real worried right now. I’m at a point physically where I can’t make this.”
Tom looked at me and he could see in my eyes that I was approaching my breaking point. Neither of us knew what to do. The next morning, we set out again. As before, we marched upriver, battling the frigid water and the slick rocks. After a half hour, we clambered up a bank and came to a road. Ahead of me and above me, I could see a series of steep inclines and switchbacks, but just looking at them, I knew I couldn’t do it. I collapsed onto the ground. Tom came up beside me, a crust of blood and scab over his eye. I looked at him, and then at Sonia coming back toward us to check on the cause of the delay.
I lifted my hand a bit to point toward Sonia, and through my cracked and swollen lips I said to Tom, “You tell that bitch for me that she can just shoot me. I don’t care. I’m not going any farther. I ain’t movin’. I can’t. I’m done. I’m out.”
Lying in a heap on the ground, somewhere layered beneath my anger, my exhaustion, and my pain, I thought, I should have grabbed that damned flower.
MARC
I hated being so far in front of Keith and Tom. I knew there was both physical and emotional strength in numbers, and I was afraid that because I was out in front that I would be taken somewhere ahead of them where I’d be shot or interrogated. I kept thinking about Tommy J and Sergeant Cruz. The FARC had separated them from us and Sonia claimed to have killed them. Was that how the FARC worked—putting their hostages in small groups and then killing them when they weren’t in sight of the others?
Farid was pushing me so hard that I had no choice but to keep moving and temporarily leave those thoughts behind on the trail. As much as I disliked how harshly he was grabbing me and pulling me to my feet, what I really hated was that he kept talking to me. I didn’t speak much Spanish, but I could recognize a few words and understand his intent. His constant refrain of “¡Vamos!” didn’t need any translation. It was usually accompanied by a shoulder-socket-tearing jerk on my hand or wrist. As intolerable as that was, it was even worse that he said over and over again that he and I were “mejores amigos.” I would nod and say, “Sí, mejores amigos,” but I was really thinking that this whole situation was a freak show and this guy was the main attraction.
Maybe it was because we knew that these men and women were called guerrillas, maybe it was our sick senses of humor, or maybe we were all a product of watching too much American television as kids, but we all immediately thought that we were stuck in The Planet of the Apes. I was thrust into the middle of a group whose language I didn’t speak and I was being pushed around by a bunch of guys who were about my height but far more stout, and who were about as unrefined a bunch of people as I’d ever seen. Perhaps the most unnerving thing was the staring. Many of them thought I was the most curious sight that they’d ever seen, and every time we stopped, a few of them would cluster around looking at me, their eyes sizing me up like I was a circus attraction. I’ve always been an open-minded kind of guy, but I felt like I was being backed into a corner and some of my worst impulses were coming out. I could feel a visceral hatred for the FARC—not because of who they were, how they looked, or the language they spoke—but because of what they were doing to us: taking our freedom just because they could. I don’t know if Farid was clueless or cruel. Whenever I couldn’t go on any more and needed to rest, or when I fell, he started to get in my face and goad me, saying in Spanish, “You can’t go on because you are a pussy. I am strong. America is weak.”
I’d just stare at him, faking like I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He seemed to take more and more pleasure in my pain and weakness as we went along. He’d grab his crotch as he stood over me and point at me: “¡No tienes huevos!” He’d laugh and then add, “Cajones grandes” while pointing at himself and acting like some caricature of a street thug from a B movie.
Once we’d put a distance between ourselves and the others, Farid seemed to relax a bit—not in his pace, or in his abuse of me—but in his posture. His body language shifted, and he grew more loose-limbed. His face lost some of the lines and creases of worry that had made him appear older, and now he looked like the teenager I suspected he really was. He also began to sing. At first I could only catch a word or two, but after a few hours of hiking and hearing this guy sing the same words over and over again, I could piece together a bit of it. “We love the peace. I am a guerrilla because I love the peace.”
When I wasn’t being yanked off the ground or listening to Farid spout nonsense, my eyes were focused at the vegetation around me. The dense thicket we traveled through was alive with all kinds of creatures. I’d always enjoyed nature shows on TV, and suddenly I had stepped into one. If it weren’t for the circumstances, I would have loved it. There was a greater variety of monkeys than I’d seen at any zoo—most of them different kinds of spider monkeys. Like our captors, they seemed really interested in the new kids in the jungle, and they perched in the trees looking down at us with their enormous grapelike eyes.
Just as the sun was about to set, two guerrillas, or at least guerrilla sympathizers, joined Farid and me. One was a young man, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He had a campesino hat on—a wide-brimmed woven thing that was a cross between a fedora and a sombrero. The other was a young woman dressed just like the guy, and her eyes were wide with astonishment at the sight of me. They were carrying a small plastic bag filled with white rice and freckled with bits of chicken. The guy used his machete to hack off a couple of palm fronds that we could use as plates. They heaped a pile on two leaves, handed one to Farid and one to me. Sitting down, Farid rounded his body and hunched his shoulders to protect his meal. He began shoveling the food into his mouth with his fingers, his nails black with dirt and so long they had begun to curl.
Even if I hadn’t seen Farid wolfing down his food, smacking his lips, and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, I still wouldn’t have had an appetite. I hadn’t eaten in nearly forty-eight hours, but the thought of food turned my stomach. The young female guerrilla sat beside me, and I could see the look of concern in her eyes. She put her hands under mine and raised them toward my face. I turned my head and screwed up my face in exaggerated disgust. The food smelled okay, but something was wrong with my stomach. Eventually she just shrugged and dumped my food back in the bag. Between mouthfuls, Farid looked up and waved them on, back down the trail we walked up, presumably to feed the others. Still chewing and licking his lips, Farid got to his feet and pulled me up.
Farid lowered his gun and waved me forward. Peering through the dense bush, I saw another guerrilla slinging his machete to clear another, more overgrown trail. At the head of this new route stood two mules. Farid indicated that I was to get onto one of them, but when I took a step forward, the mule started braying and kicking its back legs at me. The new FARC guerrilla grabbed the mule’s rope bridle and tried to quiet him, but the thing was still bucking. Farid picked up a burlap bag that the other guerrilla had left on the ground and placed it over the mule’s head. It stilled. I figured the thing got aggressive when it saw someone moving toward it to mount. Farid waved me toward the blinded mule. I edged closer to the mule and finally climbed aboard. It kicked just a bit, but with Farid holding its rein and whispering in its ear, it quickly quieted. Farid jumped on the other mule, and with the sound of the other guerrilla chopping away, we headed up the other trail. When I looked back, it was as if the trail had closed behind us.
I was glad to be off my feet, but riding a saddled mule didn’t give me much relief. Every bounce up and down was transferred through my already beat-up feet. We were on a steep incline, but with the mules moving at a good clip, we soon came to a more or less level area of the trail. To my left and to my right was darkness, but ahead of me, through the branches and vines, a dim light faintly shone.
A few moments later we exited the jungle into a large clearing where we were greeted by a breathtaking panorama of mountains spread out across the horizon; each peak cast a silhouette against the violet backdrop of the sky. About a half mile or more away, a little campesino farmhouse sat on a promontory overlooking this vista. An extremely steep switchback trail led up to the farmhouse, and Farid and I paused for a moment, both of us taking in the view. Sitting on the mule, I felt as if I was in a Hollywood western, coming in from a hard day in the mountains rounding up the herd to bring them off pasture for the winter.
When I got to the house, a group of six other guerrillas was there. They were sitting outside around a small fire. They’d driven two small forked sticks into the ground with a metal rod resting in the crotch of each. Suspended above that on the rod was a large pot. One of the guerrillas opened the pot and steam escaped, and the smell of chicken soup wafted across the air. Though I could feel my insides gnawing at themselves, I turned down their offer of food. I was feeling so alien, so dislocated from everything that I’d previously known, and so angry at the situation that I couldn’t bring myself to sit down to a meal with them.
The house was divided unequally into two rooms—a larger main area and a storage-closet shed that had a separate door to the outside. Farid pointed to the cramped storage area, no bigger than four feet by ten feet, indicating that this was where I would sleep. That wouldn’t have been too bad, except the room was also filled with sacks of rice, bags of black plastic filled with who knew what, and other assorted boxes and packages. When Farid closed the door, the space was overwhelmed by the odor of stale food and decayed flesh. Under normal circumstances, I might have found it hard to sleep, but the next thing I knew, light was filtering through the slits in the wooden walls indicating that morning had come.
The door had no lock on it, so I walked out of the shed. Scattered around the clearing were a few logs and log benches, and I took a seat with my back to the building where most of the FARC were sitting. This was really my first moment of extended time alone, awake, and not preoccupied by thoughts of the march. Into that vacuum came a rush of emotion and thoughts that overpowered me. My mental state reflected the scene in front of me—sharp peaks bathed in sunlight and a steeply carved out valley mottled in shade. As physically high up as I was at that moment, emotionally I had tumbled down that ravinelike cleft.
I found myself thinking of the day I’d left for Colombia to come on this rotation. Before my daughter, Destiney, went off to school that Friday, she’d come into Shane’s and my bedroom, where I still lay easing into my morning. Destiney gave me a big kiss and a hug—the kind only a nine-year-old girl could give to make her dad feel so loved. Now, as I sat in a clearing a lifetime away from that moment, I got angry at myself for not having gotten up that morning to spend more time with her. I should have said good-bye to Cody and Joey—my other two kids, whom other people might call my stepsons but who I just thought of as my sons.
All I could think of was Destiney’s drawing desk that sat on our screened porch. She would sit for hours at that slant-top desk, painting and drawing. Every time I came back from deployment, she had a new book to show me of colored drawings of various family scenes. I treasured those books and it tore me apart to think about how much time might pass before she presented me with another one. Joey and Cody shared a room, and I visualized them sitting on the floor on the green carpet with the outlines of streets and parking lots “driving” their Hot Wheels cars all around it. Joey’s birthday was coming up on the twenty-eighth of February, and I worried about not being there for it. I’d gotten him the Spyder paintball gun he’d been dying to have. I loved wandering around the field where I took the boys to play, and felt bad that we wouldn’t be able to try out Joey’s new gun.
Everything came back to me in such vivid recollections it was almost as if I could feel the physical presence of them weighing me down. It wasn’t that the thought of them was unpleasant; on the contrary, they were the only joy I could find in that otherwise bleak setting. But these thoughts of my kids and my wife made me feel guilty, like somehow I had let them down.
That it appeared as if I’d been brought to this farmhouse to be killed added to that weight. I was never going to see my family again. Not my mom, my dad, my brother. None of them. I’d see them all in heaven, of course, but that wouldn’t be for a long, long time. I knew that there were FARC guerrillas near me, and I didn’t want to cry in front of them. I tried to hold it all in, but all at once it was as if that weight squeezed everything out of me. I cried until I felt like my whole body was emptied of fluid. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that Tommy J and Sergeant Cruz had been separated from us and that was possibly the end of them. Sonia’s cold-blooded, matter-of-fact statement about killing them played again in my head. I kept scanning the clearing, looking to the trailhead where Farid and I had emerged from the jungle. The sunlight was crawling up the ridge opposite me, but still there was no sign of Keith or Tom.
Just when you think you’ve hit absolute bottom, something comes along to snap you out of it. In the past, that something had taken the form of a prayer or other thought about my faith, my family, or my friends. After I was done crying, I walked toward where the FARC were gathered around the fire and cooking pot. In order to get there, I had to cross a field of empty cellophane saltine cracker wrappers. They were everywhere. One of the big bags in the storeroom I’d slept on sat out in the open with packages of crackers cascading out of it. The FARC guerrillas sat around on the ground stuffing crackers in their
mouths. And they weren’t doing it a single cracker at a time; they were taking stacks of five crackers and cramming them in there. The sound of their chewing and the sight of crumbs flying everywhere was so ridiculous that I almost forgot about my despairing thoughts.
What also helped was being, for the most part, off my feet and out of my boots. Without the confinement my boots enforced, my feet ran riot. They swelled and throbbed before my eyes like a cartoon thumb struck with a hammer. There were times when I was so fascinated with my feet that I started to feel they’d taken on a life of their own. I was sure the FARC were looking at me as a source of amusement, watching as I stared at my feet. With our shared ridiculousness as an icebreaker, I felt comfortable enough to accept their offer of soup.
I was handed a spoon and an aluminum cup. I sat down on the log bench where I’d had my mini-breakdown just a few minutes before. This time, instead of facing the mountains across the way, I sat looking down the slope toward where I’d emerged from the jungle the previous night. The sun was directly overhead and I had to squint against the bright noon light. The soup was thin and a rainbow of grease, like a small spill of gasoline on a wet driveway, swirled around its surface. I could see parts of chicken sitting on the bottom of the cup. The first sip tasted vaguely of chicken, as if one had recently passed by the pot and left some chicken essence in the air and some had drifted into the broth. It was warm, it was food, and I spooned a few more swallows of it into my mouth. I was busy trying to identify what else was in the cup when something caught my eye.